ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 I described the disabled girl in the wheelchair who needed to try on the identity of a healthy person while seeing someone else experience despair and bitterness on her behalf. She seemed to feel her fate was unfair – it ought to be someone else’s. This chapter elaborates this issue by distinguishing between the grammar of wishes in neurotic states of mind and the grammar of imperative needs in borderline paranoid states of mind. It presents material from work with a borderline psychotic ten-year-old boy, Richard, who was in intensive treatment with me in the late 1960s. I began reading over his material one summer in the late 1980s and was very distressed by what I read and how I had worked two decades earlier.
